Entrepreneurship becomes global: the top 25 startups hubs in the world

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The Startup Genome project setup a year ago to gather comparative data on startups around the world. Its Startup Compass allows entrepreneurs to compare statistics on their companies with others in their locality and around the world.

A post on Techcrunch provides a great summary of some of the data gathered in the almost 12 months since the launch of the project.

I was particularly interested in the rankings of startup cities around the world, reproduced below. There is no question that the US is no longer the predominant startup country in a world in which economic and entrepreneurial activity is increasingly global.
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Competition! Win free pass to Sydney workshops on how to grow your business using crowdsourcing

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We are kicking off our global series of crowdsourcing workshops on Monday 16 April in Sydney, with a morning workshop on Getting Results From Crowds and an afternoon workshop on Crowd Business Models.

In the following weeks I will be running crowdsourcing workshops in Cologne, London, Paris, Brussels, and New York, followed later in the year by San Francisco and other leading cities.

In the spirit of crowdsourcing, we are offering a free pass to the full day consisting of both workshops in Sydney to the two best answers to the question:

What new opportunities does crowdsourcing create for growing businesses?

You can answer in two ways:
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No reputation measures is the critical flaw in the JOBS crowdfunding bill

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The JOBS crowdfunding Act is a great step forward, but the potential of the entire scheme is undermined by the lack of reputation measures.

This is my first opportunity to write about the historic passing on Thursday of the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act that allows equity crowdfunding in the US.

I have covered the early moves towards equity crowdfunding in the US that resulted in this bill and included a chapter on the topic in Getting Results From Crowds. It is very exciting to see this come to fruition, in the end faster than almost anyone could have predicted.

I believe that this is a critical shift that is taking capitalism into a new phase. The capital markets are – finally – becoming more open, allowing capital to go where it will be best used.
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V&S acquired by Havas: A pivotal moment for crowdsourcing in advertising

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The purchase by Havas of a majority stake in crowdsourced ad agency Victors & Spoils is a sign of a major shift in the advertising industry.

I have written several times before about crowdsourced advertising agency Victors & Spoils. V&S Founder and CEO John Winsor spoke at our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, and I have since written about some of their lead work with Harley-Davidson and where they have taken that.

The big news today is that global advertising conglomerate Havas has taken a majority stake in V&S, also naming John Winsor as Chief Innovation Officer for the group.
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The growing appetite for learning how to crowdsource

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[Originally posted on Getting Results From Crowds book website]

As awareness of crowdsourcing increases, there is a rapidly increasing appetite for learning how to do it well.

Yesterday I spoke at the City of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business event on Outsourcing: Costs Down + Revenues Up, alongside highly experienced executives such as Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com and Wai Hong Fong, CEO of OzHut.
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Themes of the day: Consumerization of IT, Crowdsourcing for small business, Crowdsourcing in PR

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These are frantically busy days, which is squeezing my ability to blog and capture some of the fascinating stuff flying by. In coming months I think I’ll try to do more ‘mini-blogging’, just capturing quick thoughts and impressions rather than writing up every interesting speaking engagement or media appearance I do.

Yesterday I gave three presentations, and I’d love to write (at least) a full blog post about what we covered for each one. However that’s not possible, so I’ll just share quick thoughts about each topic and what I will try to write more about later.

The day started by giving the keynote at a Consumerization of IT event run by CIO Magazine, supported by HP and Microsoft.
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An invitation to Sydney (and global) crowdsourcing workshops

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I hope you can make it!

Sydney will be the site of the launch of a global series of crowdsourcing workshops over coming months in Sydney, Amsterdam, Cologne, London, Paris, Brussels, New York, San Francisco and other cities. I am very excited about the workshops, the material we’ll cover, and what we’ll learn during the workshops to help create the forthcoming Second Edition of Getting Results From Crowds.

Below is the announcement of the Sydney workshops. Please pass this on if you think people would be interested! :-)

Crowdsourcing Workshops: Getting Business Results

Sydney, Monday 16 April
Getting Results From Crowds: 9:00am-1:30pm
Crowd Business Models: 1:30pm-5:00pm
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Yammer and why activity streams are a key foundation for integrated applications and organizations

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I caught up with some of the Yammer team this morning, including Chief Customer Officer David Obrand, while they are in town for the Yammer on Tour series. 

I was particularly interested in talking with them about Yammer’s shift to activity streams. In the massive convergence of enterprise social platforms that we’ve seen over the last years, one of the major emerging spaces is activity streams.

Last year I wrote about activity streams in the context of Tibbr’s launch. Tibbr put activity streams squarely on the map, by integrating status messages from people with notifications generated by enterprise software including ERP, CRM, and HR systems. Employees are able to follow their colleagues and they can also follow updates on any activity, including events, projects, or even invoices. Tibbr was very well positioned to do that given Tibco’s history in providing enterprise integration middleware.
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Social Media Strategy Framework: Explanation and guide

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Our Social Media Strategy Framework has been one of our most popular frameworks, with well over 100,000 views, as well as more for the translations into 12 languages.

I have used the framework extensively as a starting point to help executives understand the space and clients to develop social media strategies. Many people have told me that they have used the framework with their own organizations or clients to develop effective social media strategies, or have shared it in presentations or online. I’m delighted that it has proved so useful.

However the visual still can be hard for people to make sense of, particularly in terms of how it should be applied to their own organization. To help that I have made a brief video explaining and going through the Social Media Strategy Framework. It simply provides a high-level overview of the framework, but for many people it will probabl ybe more useful to watch the video than spend time looking at the diagram. Feel free to use the video however you want if it is helpful.

5 things to tweet and 5 things NOT to tweet

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Earlier this week I spoke at a financial advisor retreat in the stunning Margaret River region of Western Australia, a region of wide-open beauty that is the source of many extraordinary wines.

I gave two keynotes at the event on subsequent days, on How to Lock-in Your Clients, and Success in a Connected World, which drew on my connected world visual framework.

I will write more later on the quite specific topic of Success in a Connected World for Financial Advisors. For now I thought I’d share a brief extract of the content I covered in my keynote on how to approach Twitter.

Around 15-20% of the audience had Twitter accounts, so my suggestions were intended as a high-level introduction on how to get started on Twitter, though the advice is relevant to anyone. The recommendations are based on my own thoughts as well as a range of research, notably the excellent Who Gives A Tweet? Evaluating Microblog Content Value from Carnegie Mellon University. This is what I suggested:

WHAT TO TWEET
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